IF YOU BUILD IT – Warren Webster is building a community – and possibly an empire – on-line.

Warren Webster constructs digital quilt

An Osterville native is the president of one of the fastest growing new media sites in the world.

Warren Webster grew up in the village, attending Barnstable schools until he left for Northfield Mount Hermon his freshman year.

“My dad was the rector of St. Peter’s in Wianno through the ’80s and part of the ’90s,” he said. “My sister and I spent the majority of our (young) lives there.”

Webster is at the helm of Patch.com, an AOL-owned “community-specific news and information platform” that has seen enormous growth over the past year, to more than 700 sites nationwide. Barnstable’s site, barnstable-hyannis.patch.com, launched in December.

“In a time where 17,000 jobs were lost, we hired 800-plus journalists,” Webster said. “We’re pretty excited about that.”

Patch was founded in 2007 by Google’s then-President of the Americas, Tim Armstrong, as a way to provide easily accessed local community information on the Internet. Webster was the first employee of the new company.

“They hired me … a few of the best software engineers we could find, some of the best journalists, and some business people,” he said. “We spent the majority of a year holed up in an office in uptown Manhattan thinking about what we could build to solve the local information problem.”

The template they came up with is Patch.

“People didn’t have one consistent place to find the 10 most important local things they need to know,” Webster said. “Every little piece of important information. Patch is designed to boil that up.”

The first three sites were launched in suburban New Jersey in February 2009.

“We were overwhelmed by the response,” Webster said. “Thousands of e-mails. 42 states, 12 foreign countries, people saying they needed something like that in their town. We knew we had struck a chord.”

Webster and his crew turned their sights on finding someone who could “help us scale up fast.”

They found that person in founder Armstrong, who was now the chairman and CEO of AOL. Armstrong sold his 75 percent stake in Patch to AOL, which paid approximately $7 million total in cash for the startup, then invested another $50 million to help the company grow. In 2010, Patch went from 30 locations to more than 700.

The coming year is looking to be just as ambitious. Webster says the goal is to have “1,000-plus” sites by year’s end.

“If 2010 was about growth, 2011 is about growing and optimizing,” he said.

Webster’s past in Osterville has figured prominently in his new role.

“I think about the Cape all the time,” he said. “I know in Osterville it would have been great to have another way to find out what’s happening instead of looking outside the library.”

Each Patch site has its own local editor charged with finding and managing content.

Barnstable’s Patch, which went live in December 2010, is run by Jennifer Simckowitz. Herself a recent transplant to Osterville, she found and applied for the job via an on-line ad.

“Overall it’s been a great response, I think,” she said. “We’ve been raising awareness with limited marketing, mostly word of mouth, and based on that it’s been really good.”

Simckowitz is the only full-time employee, relying on a stable of six or so freelancers to help with each week’s features.

“I don’t know what the plans are for the future, it’s still kind of an unknown,” she said. “I know we’re growing here on the Cape, but I’m not sure how it’s going to pan out.”

Simckowitz and Webster see Patch evolving into an on-line community of sorts.

“We really want to be a hub of information and a place for conversation around local issues, be it government, police or entertainment,” Simckowitz said, and “really be a water cooler for the town.”

Webster’s thoughts were in line with that: “It’s about letting people know what each other are doing, getting people critical information about leading a better life in your town.”

He was particularly enthusiastic about the opportunities on his home turf.

“For Barnstable specifically, I can’t think of a better place for Patch,” he declared. “It’s such a tight-knit community, and people are so concerned about its history and future. The opportunity is to be as remarkable as the place itself.”